10 Best Windows Tools [May 18]

Several new software arrived onto the Windows platform this week. From an advisory from Mozilla to Microsoft’s new presentation tool, you’re in a for a show today. This week we’ll check a tool that lets you make multiple-OS boot USB, a tool that makes it easier to deal with log files, and we’ll check how tol keep our inbox free from spam emails, and more.

Desktop Software

Earlier this week, Microsoft released the first preview of Office Mix. Office Mix makes it easier to create and share PowerPoint presentations. In addition, it offers you tools to record the presentations, draw on slides, add multimedia files on slides, as well as record your on-screen activities.

Furthermore, you can also add polls, quizzes, exercises, and content from other applications. It also lets you upload the presentation to the Office Mix cloud in a single-click.

Complete Internet Repair is an application that offers fixes to several of your internet troubles. Whether your internet connection has been acting a bit weird lately, or isn’t connecting at all, Complete Internet Repair can help you resolve such issues.

It offers several fixes, some of which include, resetting internet protocol of your system, as well as clocking Windows firewall configuration. You can also repair settings of various tools including Winsock, Internet Explorer, Workgroup Computers View etc. The application requires absolutely no installation from your end.

Most of the applications, and system processes maintain a log file where they record each and every operation. A real world equivalent of it will be the black box that Air Planes carry. This information can come really handy at the time of a crash. System administrator and program debuggers look into log files to fetch useful information from it.

One problem with handling these log files is that they tend to be too large. Hence, when you open them on the notepad or say any other text editor, it usually slows down and causes other issues, save for the unintuitive interface. To solve this problem, we have Glogg, it is a minimalistic tool that can handle a large chunk of data as if it ware five small sentences. The orientation of the screen too helps log files to place themselves out in a quite succinct manner.

While internet security suites are reasonably good enough to protect our computers from malware, there aren’t many which can filter spam emails. For that, you can give something like Cloudmark DesktopOne a try. It comes in both – free and paid version. While the free version can only protect one account, the paid version offers support for multiple accounts at once. The commercial version can also automatically whitelist addresses from your contact list, a feature that can come very handy, and isn’t available in the free version. It works with all the popular email clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird.

There are several tools available that can let you make bootable USB drives, but most of them usually are platform dependent. Either it will only support Windows or Linux. WinSetupFromUSB takes this to the next level. Not only does it support both Windows and Linux, it also allows multiple OS(s) at once. So for instance, you can have both Windows 8 and Ubuntu’s bootable OS files in same USB at once.

Modern Apps

Share to Speech lets you listen to web articles. Just point a Web page, or a document – all popular formats are compatible, to the app, and it will automatically detect the language and read it out loud to you. It also lets you save the audio as an mp3 file, allowing you to listen to it later.

Extensions

HoverReader is a Chrome extensions that displays a pop-up box every time you hover over a link. This tool can come very useful especially when you are on sites like Reddit, Google News, TechMeme — where only an excerpt of the article is provided.

Chrome’s built-in bookmark manager is fine, however it hasn’t gone through much change over last few years. Dewey Booksmarks presents your bookmarks into a rather Pinterest-esque way, and lets you add custom tags and screenshots making it easier to organize them.

Once installed, Plug-in Disabler will close all the add-ons when you launch Firefox. This feature can help you when you want a few add-ons deactivated for a specific reason, or if you simply want to save memory resources.

Gif images have become a very vital part of our internet experience. Whether it is helping users understand a concept through the use of Gif image, instead of static images, or you want to reply to people in funny ways, Gif animated sequence of images are just too useful. But these Gif files lack audio support. Using Lala Gif you can easily assort audio content with the image files to make things even more interesting.

Tip of the week: Disable Ad Blocker from Firefox

If you think your Firefox browser has been running slow for lately, or your laptop is getting hot or starts lagging when you use Firefox, it might be because of the add-on AdBlock Plus. Ironically, the addon which is here to make internet annoyance free, is raiding the memory of your system. In a blog post on its site, Mozilla explains how AdBlock Plus affects your system memory.

Manish Singh Ex-Author Manish is an Engineering graduate in Computer Science but spends more time in writing about technology. He has written for a number of Indian and international publications including BetaNews, BGR India, WinBeta, MakeTechEasier, MediaNama, and Digit magazine among others. When not writing, you would find him ranting about the state of digital journalism on Twitter.